Ghosts: Recent Hauntings

by Richard Bowes

  “Shy,” he said, and hugged her more tightly. He could feel her breastbone against his, and he wondered if she had been wearing a padded bra when he had first seen her. Then he held her by her shoulders at arm’s length and smiled into her squinting, elfin eyes. “I’ve got to make a call,” he said.

  He pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, flipped it open and tapped in Christine’s well-remembered number. He was already ten minutes late for their meeting.

  “Christine,” he said, “I’ve got to beg off . . . no, I’m not going to be home. I’m going to be in Orange County—”

  Cheyenne mouthed Overnight.

  “—overnight,” Sydney went on, “till tomorrow. No, I . . . I’ll explain it later, and I owe you a lunch. No, I haven’t sold it yet! I gotta run, I’m in traffic and I can’t drive and talk at the same time. Right, right—’bye!”

  He folded it and tucked it back into his pocket.

  Cheyenne nodded. “To avoid complications,” she said.

  Sydney had stepped back from her, but he was holding her hand—possibly to keep her from disappearing again. “My New Year’s resolution,” he said with a rueful smile, “was not to tell any lies.”

  “My attitude toward New Year’s resolutions is the same as Oscar Wilde’s,” she said, stepping around the pool coping and swinging his hand.

  “What did he say about them?” asked Sydney, falling into step beside her.

  “I don’t know if he ever said anything about them,” she said, “but if he did, I’m sure I agree with it.”

  She looked back at him, then glanced past him and lost her smile.

  “Don’t turn around,” she said quickly, so he just stared at her face, which seemed bony and starved between the wings of tangled red hair. “Now look around, but scan the whole square, like you’re calculating if they could land the Goodyear blimp here.”

  Sydney let his gaze swivel from Hill Street, across the trees and broad pavement of the square, to the pillared arch of the Biltmore entrance. Up there toward the east end of the square he had seen a gray-haired woman in a loose blue dress; she seemed to be the same woman he had seen behind them on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday.

  He let his eyes come back around to focus on Cheyenne’s face.

  “You saw that woman?” she said to him. “The one that looks like . . . some kind of featherless monkey? Stay away from her, she’ll tell you lies about me.”

  Looking at the Biltmore entrance had reminded him that Christine might have parked in the Hill Street lot too. “Let’s sit behind one of these balls,” he said. And when they had walked down the steps and sat on the cement coping, leaning back against the receding under-curve of the nearest stone sphere, he said, “I found your book. I hope you don’t mind that I know who you are.”

  She was still holding his hand, and now she squeezed it. “Who am I, lover?”

  “You’re Cheyenne Fleming. You—you’re—“

  “Yes. How did I die?”

  He took a deep breath. “You killed yourself.”

  “I did? Why?”

  “Because your sister—I read—ran off with your fiancé.”

  She closed her eyes and twined her fingers through his. “Urbane legends. Can I come over to your place tonight? I want to copy one of my poems in the book, write it out again in the blank space around the printed version, and I need you to hold my hand, guide my hand while I write it.”

  “Okay,” he said. His heart was thudding in his chest. Inviting her over my threshold, he thought. “I’d like that,” he added with dizzy bravado.

  “I’ve got the pen to use,” she went on. “It’s my special pen, they buried me with it.”

  “Okay.” Buried her with it, he thought. Buried her with it.

  “I love you,” she said, her eyes still closed. “Do you love me? Tell me you love me.”

  He was sitting down, but his head was spinning with vertigo as if an infinite black gulf yawned at his feet. This was her inviting him over her threshold.

  “Under,” he said in a shaky voice, “normal circumstances, I’d certainly be in love with you.”

  “Nobody falls in love under normal circumstances,” she said softly, rubbing his finger with her warm thumb. He restrained an impulse to look to see if there was still ink on it. “Love isn’t in the category of normal things. Not any worthwhile kind of love, anyway.” She opened her eyes and waved her free hand behind them toward the square. “Normal people. I hate them.”

  “Me too,” said Sydney.

  “Actually,” she said, looking down at their linked hands, “I didn’t kill myself.” She paused for so long that he was about to ask her what had happened, when she went on quietly, “My sister Rebecca shot me, and made it look like a suicide. After that she apparently did go away with my fiancé. But she killed me because she had made herself into an imitation of me, and without me in the picture, she’d be the original.” Through her hand he felt her shiver. “I’ve been alone in the dark for a long time,” she said in a small voice.

  Sydney freed his hand so that he could put his arm around her narrow shoulders, and he kissed her hair.

  Cheyenne looked up with a grin that made slits of her eyes. “But I don’t think she’s prospered! Doesn’t she look terrible?”

  Sydney resisted the impulse to look around again. “Was that—?”

  Cheyenne frowned. “I’ve got to go—I can’t stay here for very long at a time, not until we copy that poem.”

  She kissed him, and their mouths opened, and for a moment his tongue touched hers. When their lips parted their foreheads were pressed together, and he whispered, “Let’s get that poem copied, then.”

  She smiled, deepening the lines in her cheeks, and looked down. “Sit back now and look away from me,” she said. “And I’ll come to your place tonight.”

  He pressed his palms against the surface of the cement coping and pushed himself away from her, and looked toward Hill Street.

  After a moment, “Shy?” he said; and when he looked around she was gone. “I love you,” he said to the empty air.

  “Everybody did,” came a raspy voice from behind and above him.

  For a moment he went on staring at the place where Cheyenne had sat; then he sighed deeply and looked around.

  The old woman in the blue dress was standing at the top of the stairs, and now began stepping carefully down them in boxy old-lady shoes.

  Her eyes were pouchy above round cheeks and not much of a chin, and Sydney imagined she’d been cute decades ago.

  “Are,” he said in a voice he made himself keep level, “you Rebecca?”

  She stopped in front of him and nodded, frowning in the sun-glare. “Rebecca Fleming,” she said. “The cherished name.” The diesel-scented breeze was blowing her white hair around her face, and she pushed it back with one frail, spotted hand. “Did she say I killed her?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, “Yes,” Sydney said.

  She sat down, far enough away from him that he didn’t feel called on to move further away. Why hadn’t he brought a flask?

  “True,” she said, exhaling as if she’d been holding her breath. “True, I did.” She looked across at him, and he reluctantly met her eyes. They were green, just like Cheyenne’s.

  “I bet,” she said, “you bought a book of hers, signed.” She barked two syllables of a laugh. “And I bet she’s still got her fountain pen. We buried it with her.”

  “I don’t think you and I have much to say to each other,” said Sydney stiffly. He started to get to his feet.

  “It was self-defense, if you’re curious,” she said, not stirring.

  He paused, bracing himself on his hands.

  “She came to my bed,” said Rebecca, “with a revolver. I woke up when she touched the cold muzzle to my forehead. This is thirty-seven years ago, but I remember it as if it were last night—we were in a crummy motel south of Santa Monica Boulevard, on one of her low-life tours. I sat up and pushed the gun away
, but she kept trying to get it aimed at me—she was laughing, irritated, cajoling, I wasn’t playing along properly—and when I pushed it back toward her it went off. Under her chin. I wrote a suicide note for her.”

  The old woman’s face was stony. Sydney sat back down.

  “I loved her,” she said. “If I’d known that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted.” She smiled at him belligerently. “Crush an ant sometime, and then smell your fingers. I wonder what became of the clothes we buried her in. Not a sweatshirt and jeans.”

  “A black linen suit,” said Sydney, “with a white blouse. They were damp.”

  “Well, groundwater, you know, even with a cement grave-liner. And a padded bra, for the photographs. I fixed it up myself, crying so hard I could barely see the stitches—I filled the lining with bird-seed to flesh her out.”

  Sydney recalled the vines that had seemed to be embroidered on Cheyenne’s bra, that first day. “It sprouted.”

  Rebecca laughed softly. “ ‘Quickens, gladly grows.’ She wants something from you.” Rebecca fumbled in a pocket of her skirt. “Bring the moon to free her from these yellowed pages.”

  Sydney squinted at her. “You’ve read that version of the sonnet?”

  Rebecca was now holding out a two-inch clear plastic cylinder with metal bands on it. “I was there when she wrote it. She read it to me when the ink was still wet. It was printed that way in only one copy of the book, the copy you obviously found, God help us all. This is one of her ink cartridges. You stick this end in the ink bottle and twist the other end—that retracts the plunger. When she was writing poetry she used to use about nine parts Schaeffer’s black ink and one part her own blood.”

  She was still holding it toward him, so he took it from her.

  “The signature in your book certainly contains some of her blood,” Rebecca said.

  “A signature and a thumbprint,” said Sydney absently, rolling the narrow cylinder in his palm. He twisted the back end, and saw the tiny red ring of the plunger move smoothly up the inside of the clear barrel.

  “And you touched the thumbprint.”

  “Yes. I’m glad I did.”

  “You brought her to this cycle of the moon. She arrived on the new moon, though you probably didn’t find the book and touch her thumb till further on in the cycle; she’d instantly stain the whole twenty-eight days, I’m sure, backward and forward. Do you know yet what she wants you to do?”

  If I’d known, Rebecca had said, that resisting her would end up killing her, I swear, I wouldn’t have resisted. Sydney realized, to his dismay, that he believed her.

  “Hold her hand, guide it, I guess, while she copies a poem,” he said.

  “That poem, I have no doubt. She’s a ghost—I suppose she imagines that writing it again will project her spirit back to the night when she originally wrote it—so she can make a better attempt at killing me three years later, in 1969. She was thirty-five, in ’69. I was thirty-three.”

  “She looks younger.”

  “She always did. See little Shy riding horseback, you’d think she was twelve years old.” Rebecca sat back. “She’s pretty physical, right? I mean, she can hold things, touch things?”

  Sydney remembered Cheyenne’s fingers intertwined with his.

  “Yes.”

  “I’d think she could hold a pen. I wonder why she needs help copying the poem.”

  “I—” Sydney began.

  But Rebecca interrupted him. “If you do it for her,” she said, “and it works, she won’t have died. I’ll be the one that died in ’69. She’ll be seventy-two now, and you won’t have met her. Well, she’ll probably look you up, if she remembers to be grateful, but you won’t remember any of . . . this interlude with her.” She smiled wryly. “And you certainly won’t meet me. That’s a plus, I imagine. Do you have any high-proof liquor, at your house?”

  “You can’t come over!” said Sydney, appalled.

  “No, I wasn’t thinking of that. Never mind. But you might ask her—”

  She had paused, and Sydney raised his eyebrows.

  “You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there. I know I’d have left, moved out, if she had told me she really needed that. I’d have stopped . . . trying to be her. I only did it because I loved her.” She smiled, and for a moment as she stood up Sydney could see that she must once have been very pretty.

  “Goodbye, Resurrection Man,” she said, and turned and shuffled away up the cement steps.

  Sydney didn’t call after her. After a moment he realized that he was still holding the plastic ink-cartridge, and he put it in his pocket.

  High-proof liquor, he thought unhappily.

  Back in his apartment after making a couple of purchases, he poured himself a shot of bourbon from the kitchen bottle and sat down by the window with the Fleming book.

  But when the Resurrection Man shall bring

  The moon to free me from these yellowed pages,

  The gift is mine, there won’t be anything

  For you.

  The moon had been full last night. Or maybe just a hair short of full, and it would be full tonight.

  You might ask her not to kill me, when she gets back there.

  He opened the bags he had carried home from a liquor store and a stationer’s, and he pulled the ink cartridge out of his pocket.

  One bag contained a squat glass bottle of Schaeffer’s black ink, and he unscrewed the lid; there was a little pool of ink in the well on the inside of the open bottle’s rim, and he stuck the end of the cartridge into the ink and twisted the back. The plunger retracted, and the barrel ahead of it was black.

  When it was a third filled, he stopped, and he opened the other bag. It contained a tiny plastic 50-milliliter bottle—what he thought of as breakfast-sized—of Bacardi 151-proof rum. He twisted off the cap and stuck the cartridge into the vapory liquor. He twisted the end of the cartridge until it stopped, filled, and even though the cylinder now contained two-thirds rum, it was still jet-black.

  He had considered buying lighter-fluid, but decided that the 151-proof rum—seventy-five percent alcohol—would probably be more flammable. And he could drink what he didn’t use.

  He was dozing in the chair when he heard someone moving in the kitchen. He sat up, disoriented, and hoarsely called, “Who’s there?”

  He lurched to his feet, catching the book but missing the tiny empty rum bottle.

  “Who were you expecting, lover?” came Cheyenne’s husky voice. “Should I have knocked? You already invited me.”

  He stumbled across the dim living room into the kitchen. The overhead light was on in there, and through the little kitchen window he saw that it was dark outside.

  Cheyenne was sweeping the last of the ants off the counter with her hand, and as he watched she rubbed them vigorously between her palms and wiped her open hands along her jaw and neck, then picked up the half-full bourbon bottle.

  She was wearing the black linen skirt and jacket again—and, he could see, the birdseed-sprouting bra under the white blouse. The clothes were somehow still damp.

  “I talked to Rebecca,” he blurted, thinking about the ink cartridge in his pocket.

  “I told you not to,” she said absently. “Where do you keep glasses? Or do you expect me to drink right out of the bottle? Did she say she killed me in self-defense?”

  “Yes.”

  “Glasses?”

  He stepped past her and opened a cupboard and handed her an Old-Fashioned glass. “Yes,” he said again.

  She smiled up at him from beneath her dark eyelashes as she poured a couple of ounces of amber liquor into the glass, then put down the bottle and caressed his cheek. The fruit-and-spice smell of crushed ants was strong.

  “It was my fault!” she said, laughing as she spoke. “I shouldn’t have touched her with the barrel! And so it was little Shy that wound up getting killed, miserabile dictu! I was . . . nonplussed in eternity.” She took a deep
sip of the bourbon and then sang, “ ‘Take my hand, I’m nonplussed in eternity . . . ’ ”

  He wasn’t smiling, so she pushed out her thin red lips. “Oh, lover, don’t pout. Am I my sister’s keeper? Did you know she claimed I got my best poems by stealing her ideas? As if anybody couldn’t tell from reading her poetry which of us was the original! At least I had already got that copy of my book out there, out in the world, like a message in a bottle, a soul in a bottle, for you to eventually—”

  Sydney had held up his hand, and she stopped. “She said to tell you . . . not to kill her. She said she’d just move out if you asked her to. If she knew it was important to you.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  He frowned and took a breath, but she spoke again before he could.

  “Are you still going to help me copy out my poem? I can’t write it by myself, because the first word of it is the name of the person who killed me.”

  Her eyes were wide and her eyebrows were raised as she looked down at the book in his hand and then back up at him.

  “I’d do it for you,” she added softly, “because I love you. Do you love me?”

  She couldn’t be taller than five-foot one-inch, and with her long neck and thin arms, and her big eyes under the disordered hair, she looked young and frail.

  “Yes,” he said. I do, he thought. And I’m going to exorcise you. I’m going to spread that flammable ink-and-rum mix over the page and then touch it with a cigarette.

  It was printed that way in only one copy of the book, Rebecca had said, the copy you obviously found, God help us all. A soul in a bottle.

  There won’t be another Resurrection Man.

  He made himself smile. “You’ve got a pen, you said.”

  She reached thin fingers into the neck of her blouse and pulled out a long, tapering black pen. She shook it to dislodge a thin white tendril with a tiny green leaf on it.

  “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  She hesitated, then laid the pen in his palm.

  He handed her the book, then pulled off the pen’s cap, exposing the gleaming, wedge-shaped nib. “Do you need to dip it in an ink bottle?” he asked.

  “No, it’s got a cartridge in it. Unscrew the end.”